Parallels of Father and Son
by ncfan
Summary: Jiraiya tracks Naruto down to a decimated battlefield one cold morning, and finds a broken man. Sidestory to go with Ayien's The Nine Broken Mirrors. Contains spoilers to NBM. T for angst, slight swearing and Jiraiya's humor. You have been warned.


This is a sidestory to go with Ayien's _The Nine Broken Mirrors._ It is written with Ayien's permission. This story contains spoilers for the more recent chapters of NBM. You have been warned.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

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The morning dawned with a weak yellow light that spilled over the sea and sparsely grassed hills.

The night had been cold to Jiraiya's aging bones; the dew that gently muffled the ground had almost become frost.

The Toad sannin hopped down from the summon that had transported him—not Gamabunta; he wasn't going to summon the boss for something so trivial as transportation—, thanking it, and it vanished in a puff of smoke.

The silence was oppressive. Jiraiya surveyed the grisly scene with a heavy heart. There was only the mournful cry of the seagulls, saddened because they'd finally been able to pick all the corpses clean down to the bare bones.

The three young shinobi, two male and one kunoichi, along with a monster dog, sat on the grass at the base of a grassy sand dune, staring out at the morning sea. They were pale and silent; one clumsily cradled a broken arm.

One of the young men, a brown-haired boy with red markings on his cheeks, saw him, but said nothing. He simply nodded up the hill with harsh, unforgiving eyes—apparently old wounds ran deep--, stroking the dog whose head was in his lap.

As Jiraiya started the trek up the hill, he thought he heard the kunoichi whimper.

The long walk up the hill was made difficult only by the fact that the sand was loose. It shook and shifted under his feet, making Jiraiya feel like an old man. Which, he consistently insisted to himself, he was not.

And there he was.

Naruto's head of thick, ragged blond hair was bent as he sat on his knees before the top half of a sword (from the make, one of Kumo) buried deep within the sandy earth, in front of a shallow mound of freshly turned earth.

As soon as he had heard that the battle on the coast had been won in Konoha's name, Jiraiya had hotfooted it to the scene.

He wasn't sure why. Jiraiya just knew that it had everything with the boy brought to his knees before him.

Maybe it was to see if Naruto was alright (Jiraiya wasn't too worried on that score; the boy's impossible, inexplicable good luck made it to where he could stand in the eye wall of a hurricane and come out unscathed). Maybe it was to mock him or berate him (Jiraiya could understand if he wanted to do that to Naruto; he had been nursing festering wounds of betrayal and hurt for the last six years, after all, and the kid had been a brainless idiot to believe a word the Kyuubi said, the blasted liar). But mainly, Jiraiya had the feeling that the whole reason he'd trekked so many miles was to impress upon Naruto that this was_ all his fault._

What Jiraiya hadn't been expecting was to find his former student, even if he had been his student of only a few weeks brought low by grief in front of a grave, no less.

Jiraiya knew who had died. He remembered vaguely, a scrawny teenager with cheerful hazel eyes who looked like Kisame Hoshigaki from the village whose forces the Konoha nin had been fighting during that very battle.

A grinning boy, who liked pranks and eating. Just like Naruto. Just like…Naruto.

"I wonder how the others are going to take it." If a dead fish could have a voice, it would sound like Naruto's; the kid didn't look up.

Jiraiya said nothing, thinking that Naruto hadn't changed at all. Though the changes in the boy were glaring, he refused to see it, and what he did see was an undersized twelve-year-old instead of the gaunt, broken adult he had become. The whisker marks seemed darker and thicker than usual.

"Gaara and Riko will pretend not to care, if for different reasons. Gaara's afraid to love anyone and Riko'll want to put up a stoic face so no one'll be afraid she'll seize." The second sentence was superfluous, unneeded. Jiraiya wondered if Naruto even knew it was coming out of his mouth.

"Varg and Moriko…I don't wanna think about that. I don't wanna see their faces when they find out." A small, keening sob like that of a tormented cat wrenched itself from Naruto's throat, and, unwillingly, a small tendril of pity like a blooming plant unfurled inside Jiraiya's chest, but deep inside, he was thinking that he had warned him.

Then, to the sannin's horror, Naruto began to laugh. The laughter was weak, maddened and maddening. The laughter was like the creak of a door with rusted hinges being opened far too forcefully. Jiraiya wondered if the boy who looked painfully like his father had finally snapped.

"Yugito…Yugito…she'll be so mad." As his voice was broken up by low, raspy giggles, tears began to pour down his face.

_Laughing through the tears. That creepy kid…Sai, was his name?...said that a smile can help through a tough situation._

"She swore…she swore…that she wasn't going to let any of us die before her. She'll probably track down his soul and try to throttle it."

Then Jiraiya knew. He knew that this was voyeurism of the worst kind, the lowest of the low. This went beyond peeping on women in the bathhouses or watching kunoichi train in the hot summer sun until sweat made their clothes stick to the soft, sensual curves of their thighs.

He momentarily caught the eyes of the three shinobi at the base of the dune, and knew that they felt the same way. Humbled by his grief and craving the decency to let him grieve in private, yet unable to look away. Shamed and shocked into silence.

Wanting to break the horrors of embarrassment and indignity, Jiraiya tried to think up a lecherous quip. "I'd be in hog heaven, having a lady like _that_ trying to choke me."

Naruto scowled, though he still didn't look up. Jiraiya was suddenly glad, the burning feeling in his stomach waning yet waxing. He'd managed to distract Naruto from his earth-shattering grief, if only momentarily.

"That's not funny, you old pervert, and you know it. She'd as soon kill you as do something like that."

Jiraiya snorted hollowly. "You're probably right."

The moment passed.

"I wonder who will be next." His voice was a death knell calling to all blind, faithful, idealistic soldiers. Calling them to go down in some supposed "blaze of glory" that no one five years later would be alive to remember or care about.

_He's jumping from subject to subject; the minds of those caught in grief do tend to wander a bit. After this we'll probably be talking about butterflies._

"I look at them everyday and wonder if this will be the day they die. But I keep wondering "who will be next.

"If it's Yugito, then I might go mad and decimate a battlefield, yet I'll feel happy for her at the same time. She's so close to Death already; she's practically Death's living representative on Earth! Dying would mean little to her; just the end of a useless existence, passing on to yet another useless existence.

"If it's Gaara, then…then…" he began to choke, and his voice grew like shattered glass, like a broken mirror. "Gaara's…everything. He's been there from the beginning. He's closer than a brother. I don't think I could live…if he died."

Naruto clenched the ill-rooted grasses at his feet in some semblance of grief or rage. "But deep down, looking at them, for all the frailties that each possess, I know it'll be Riko."

A few disjointed thoughts flashed through Jiraiya's mind. _Young girl…blindfold…clings to the jinchuuriki Gaara…seizures…more and more…chances of death increasing with each passing day…speeding towards death._ Yes, he could see quite clearly why Naruto thought that the increasingly frail jinchuuriki of the Shichibi would be the next to die.

"We've been so close to death so many times. I mean, we were all nearly killed in Iwa picking up Riko. And all because the stupid villagers thought I was the Yellow Flash's son."

Jiraiya felt his back seize. He gaped down at Naruto, his eyes burned open. _So even they see it?_

Naruto didn't notice his former teacher's reaction to his words. "Isn't that awful? I know I sort of look like him, but seriously, _the Fourth Hokage's son_? He'd be so disappointed."

The toad sannin felt his mouth clench like it always did when he thought of that. He tried jamming his teeth together to keep the hurtful, acerbic words from spilling out. But he couldn't quite do it. "Yeah, he sure would be," Jiraiya whispered, his voice soft with bitter venom.

Naruto didn't hear him. "The Fourth? I don't really know what to think of him right now. Once, I admired him, because to me he seemed like everything a leader should be.

"Then, at some point, I think I hated him."

_What?! Why?!_ It was all Jiraiya could do to keep from jumping down and shaking the skinny kid, because a son wasn't supposed to think that way about his father, even if he didn't know that the man in question was his father. Because sons were supposed to _love_ their fathers, respect their fathers.

"Because even though he thought that what he was doing was right, and that there was no other way, it was still _my life_ he was screwing up, and it's not him who has to bear the burden of that decision, it's me." Naruto's voice caught in his throat.

This sobered Jiraiya. He hated to admit it, but there were many times, when he lay awake in the dead of night, that he thought that if Minato could see what his decision had done to his son, he would have wept in compunction and rage.

"And nowadays, I feel really, really sorry for him.

"I know as well as he does what it's like to make a decision that you know is right, even knowing that no one else may ever be able to see it that way. I know what it's like to do the right thing and have everyone I care about hate me for it. But if it saves them, then I can rest easy, even if everyone in existence curses my name until no one remembers it anymore.

"You're right; the Kyuubi is probably the biggest liar alive—"

His mouth dropped open again; _He's actually admitting that he may have been wrong?_

"—and I was really stupid to take what he showed me at face value. But you know, the Kyuubi's also the most self-serving creature in existence. That journey…to find the other jinchuuriki? Quite frankly, it was difficult and downright _dangerous_. The Kyuubi wasn't going to expose himself to that sort of danger unless he was sure the alternative was worse. Since he can die with me, I like to think that even though he'll kill me at the first try, he's going to try to keep me alive as long as possible so he can kill me himself.

"Don't _ever_ think that I did this lightly, that I was able to leave Konoha without a single regret." Naruto looked up for the first time, and his eyes were…horrible, alight with flickering fire, red-tinged. They were also sodden. "I _knew_ what I was leaving behind. Konoha and everyone in it was my whole life; I dreamt of that place for months, _years_ afterwards!

"But…but…" the wretched sobs rose once more to threaten to drown out his uneven voice. "If there was even a sliver of a chance that what I saw—the other future—might come true, I was willing to do everything in my power to keep it from happening. And if keeping you all alive meant that I had to leave and never come back, then so be it. If preventing that…that…future meant that everyone I ever cared about would hate me, then I could live in exile with a smile on my face."

_This is truly the meaning of a jinchuuriki's life. To be shunned by those he would protect at any cost, no matter how unreasonable or exacting the price._

"When I had to leave you guys behind, I left behind my family. Everyone I cared about was _there_, in Konoha, and it was kinda hard to take that I'd never be able to go back. I wondered if everyone there would hate me."

Jiraiya reacted to that the way one would to a physical blow. _Just like Naruto, to be worrying about something like that._ He swallowed. _But for the record kid, no, I never hated you. Wanted to beat you up maybe/certainly, but I never hated you, Naruto._

And Naruto wasn't done torturing him yet.

"But then I found a new family.

"The jinchuuriki became my family. They weren't my first family, and I'll never forget what I left behind, but they became everything to me. Brothers, sisters, sons, daughters. Everything I never had, they became to me.

"And for a time, we were happy." Naruto's eyes glazed over; the smile on his face was disturbing in the cold morning light. "We were happy, despite the fact that Riko's slowly dying. Despite the fact that Gaara and Yugito still go ballistic and sadistic on us from time to time. Despite the fact that Noboru's pain was growing worse over time. Despite the fact that it became painfully clear that Moriko was never going to be in the proper learning level for her age group.

"But then the world butted in." Naruto's eyes darkened; his hands went back to their previous task of clutching the turf the way a predator would to wound it's prey. "I'll admit, I was pretty damn scared to go back to Konoha. But I knew I had to. Even if none of the others agreed, I still would have come. The people who gave a reason for living were there. Everyone who had made my life bearable, their lives were on the line.

"But what… But what… what was it for?" Pitiful, desolate sobs grew louder and louder. Jiraiya thought he would be sick.

"I suppose… it was a good thing I left Konoha, that my dreams are dead and buried. It's a good thing I don't want to be Hokage anymore, because I don't think I've got what it takes anymore."

Jiraiya stood shell-shocked for a moment, before his head and eyes lowered in defeat. _Is this really Naruto? What has the world done to you? What has happened to you in these six years? The Naruto I knew would have never admitted defeat, even when it was staring him plain in the face, even when he had nothing left._

"I mean…" His voice was barely coherent anymore. "How can I be Hokage…if I can't even protect one person? What kind of leader am I? I c-couldn't even protect him. Katashi…he…I…he _promised_…" All words became unintelligible after that.

Tears threatened to prick their way through Jiraiya's heavy brown eyes. _This_ _was_ Naruto. Bowed and broken.

He was struck with the memory of Minato after Obito died. His student had managed to remain calm until they got to Jiraiya's apartment. Then the floodgates were loosed. Jiraiya remembered Minato, collapsed and prostrate at Jiraiya's feet, sobbing and asking why he hadn't been able to save Obito. Jiraiya had been tempted to haul Minato to his feet and slap him a few times until he remembered. This was the first time Minato had lost a student.

Instead of slapping him, Jiraiya had liberally fed Minato a bottle of mild sake to calm him down; Minato, Kakashi and Rin had spent the night sacked out on Jiraiya's couch, easy chair and spare bed respectively.

Jiraiya wished he had a bottle of _strong_ sake to shove down Naruto's throat, to make him forget about Katashi's death, the war, _everything_…

_I was wrong. He has changed. And I'll be damned if he isn't more like his father now then he was then. Compassionate, worrying about everyone but himself… You're wrong, Naruto. You've still got the makings of a great leader._

It would have been alright if Jiraiya had managed to put those words to the morning. But he didn't. He couldn't. He doubted that Naruto would have been able to hear him anyway, the way he was sobbing.

Jiraiya's eyes met with the three shinobi at the base of the hill. The eyes of the boy with the dog were softened in pity; he seemed to be forgetting the hatred that had fired his eyes before. The boy with the broken arm looked faintly uneasy in place of his usual stoic mien; the kunoichi was crying silently, tears sliding down her face.

Jiraiya sighed and started the trek back down the hill, leaving Naruto alone with his grief.

* * *

As I said before, this is a sidestory to go with Ayien's _The Nine Broken Mirrors_, written with Ayien's permission. I suggest you read the story; it's one of the best I've seen on this site.

I hope you liked it; I certainly enjoyed writing it! Reviews are more precious than gold; all donations, flames or otherwise, are welcome.


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